Interviewed shortly before his death, the French photographer Robert Doisneau said of his life's work, 'a hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there, and even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds snatched from eternity'. If photography, more than any other art form, is about this snatching and freezing of the transient moment, Hiroshi Sugimoto is its reigning iconoclast, a master of slowness in a medium devoted to speed and split-second timing.

The centrepiece of this, his first London solo show, is a photograph of a candle burning over an entire evening: five hours of flickering light and moving, smoky air distilled into one blurred, abstract image. Whereas the great masters like Doisneau attempted to render the wonder of the everyday in a fraction of a second, Sugimoto - through the use of long, slow exposures and a meticulous formalism - seems to make the wondrous appear opaque and unreal, drained of its intensity but brimming with latent mystery.

Born in Tokyo in 1948, the 55-year-old Sugimoto came to photography relatively late, having studied politics and sociology until his mid-twenties. Inspired by classical photography, his work is as much to do with the process of creating an image as the image itself. For his Theatres project, he photographed the interiors of various old cinemas, each time positioning his wide format camera at the back of the balcony, and simply opening the camera shutter for the entire duration of a film. The end result is a series of images of what appear to be empty theatres bathed in the eerie white light of uniformly blank screens: hours of movement and narrative distilled into a ghostly nothingness.

This kind of ironic reversal is a key Sugimoto signature. The only time people have appeared in his work was when he created some disturbingly lifelike portraits of Castro, Lenin and Lady Di from their respective waxworks in Madame Tussaud's. Death, or more accurately, the absence of life, hovers around all his meticulously conceived images.

Sugimoto's most ambitious project is the Seascapes series, made up of some 500 photographs in all, 11 of which are on show here. Since 1990 he has set up his traditional wooden box camera on cliffs and promontories in some of the remotest parts of the world and photographed the ocean and the sky, usually in the hours before dawn and just after dusk. These oddly elusive images are almost spectral in their greyness, their shared sense of stillness, and their evocation of something both unchanging and infinitely shifting. They are also, like all of Sugimoto's work, exercises in formalism, the horizon line a fixed constant across the middle of each image.

Many of the night Seascapes require you to lean in close and squint in order to make sure that the sea is is not simply a square of blackness merging into another square of greyness that is the sky. Here and there, a shimmer of ghostly light allows you to make out the hint of a wave pattern. The titles, too, are purely functional: Boden Sea, Uttwil 1993; North Pacific Ocean, Stinson Beach 1994; Lake Superior, Cascade River 1995. They are all, as it were, dead seas, drained of their colour and elemental energy by the flattening gaze of Sugimoto's camera lens.

In another room, six separate images of Tokyo's Imperial Gardens, taken at different times at dawn, make up a composite work entitled Pine Landscape 2001. They look more like etchings than photographs. The pine is an emblematic image in traditional Japanese culture, often forming the simple backdrop to Noh plays, and signifying age and permanence. Here, though, you could as easily be looking at a Californian desert at night, or some ancient petrified forest, eerie and lifeless. It is this strange hinterland, somewhere between the mysterious and the mundane, that Sugimoto occupies and exploits in all his work.

For all this technical prowess, Sugimoto is first and foremost a minimalist, someone whose entire palette consists of infinite shades of grey, and whose preoccupation with time and emptiness seems more and more to shade into an elliptical investigation of death and mortality. Imagine Samuel Beckett, had he picked up a Hasselblad rather than a fountain pen to pursue his final meditations on silence. The wilful sameness of much of the work here, though, may test the patience of the more sceptical visitor.

'All the young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality,' wrote Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida , 'do not know that they are agents of death'. One has the sense that Sugimoto knows this implicitly. His work is ghostly in form and in its lingering effect, resonant not so much for what it shows as for what it might suggest, and the mood it creates in the viewer. If there is such a thing as ambient photography, this is it.

Three to see

Buried Treasure: Finding Our Past British Museum, London WC1, until 14 Mar Major exhibition of British archaeology.

Paul McCarthy Hauser & Wirth, London SW1, until 20 Dec Shocking installation by this US artist - famous for those inflatables outside Tate Modern - is inaugural show in this new gallery housed in a Grade II-listed Lutyens building.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until 18 Jan First major show since the 1970s of this founder member of the Pre-Raphaelites.